


No Such Thing

by irisbleufic



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Apocalypse, Awkward Conversations, Cars, Classic Cars, Conversations, Driving, First Time, Idiots in Love, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Post-Apocalypse, Prophecy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-04
Packaged: 2018-05-11 19:32:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5639368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irisbleufic/pseuds/irisbleufic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"You mean [Agnes] was trying to reassure us the whole time that the world wasn't, in fact, going to end?"</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Such Thing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Macdicilla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Macdicilla/gifts).



What he ought to be feeling, Crowley decided, was relief. Sheer, _unadulterated_ relief that he and Aziraphale, instead of having been incinerated on-sight by the displeased agents of Satan Himself and God Almighty, had got to hang around to watch an eleven-year-old boy and his cohort of miscreants hand Beelzebub, Metatron, and the Four Horsemen their own ideological arses.  
  
Instead, what Crowley felt was _nervous_. He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel, glaring at the traffic signal overhead. No more messing about, was it? He'd let the signal tick through its mechanical biorhythm without interfering just this once. Just in case.  
  
"The tape ended several minutes ago," Aziraphale pointed out kindly, reaching for the Jeep's stereo buttons. "Given your usual fare, I must say I've quite enjoyed a spot of Handel. Let's see—"  
  
"Just leave it," Crowley sighed, lightly smacking Aziraphale's hand away. He hit _EJECT_ without hesitation, letting the tape rest in the cruel limbo of protrusion. "I can't concentrate."  
  
"The roads aren't as busy as one might expect for this time of night," Aziraphale pointed out, edging in with his index finger, inexplicably determined to keep the music. "Surely it'll calm you?"  
  
"It hasn't _calmed_ me!" Crowley snapped, laying hard on the Jeep's horn as an elderly motorist cut him off. "It's just served as a convenient distraction. _Thanks a lot, pal!_ "  
  
Aziraphale set an unnervingly gentle hand on his arm. "Crowley, if you're still afraid—"  
  
"Any creature that's chosen to call this planet home—and that's exactly _two_ of us, maybe a few more if those old friends of yours are still hanging about, because all the rest really never had a say in the matter, did they?—is afraid," Crowley said, taking what he fiercely hoped _wasn't_ the wrong turning. "Terrible things happen here. Terrible, beautiful things. They've happened since the very Beginning, angel, and they're going to keep happening. Of _course_ I'm afraid."  
  
"I suppose Agnes has got that right, then," muttered Aziraphale. "As per usual, damn her luck."  
  
Crowley shoved his sunglasses up into his hair, not really caring if any of the humans passing in the other lane happened to glance over and get a shock, turning to Aziraphale. "Care to explain?"  
  
"There were a number of prophecies I found rather puzzling," Aziraphale admitted, shrugging. "It seemed that many of them couldn't possibly happen in the time allotted; what's more, many of them were phrased such that the clever old girl seemed to, er, have faith that things might get on with...getting on. Which, at the time, had struck me as entirely illogical, but at this stage—"  
  
"You mean she was trying to reassure us the whole time that the world wasn't, in fact, going to end?" Crowley cut in, fascinated and horrified all at once. "You might've mentioned that sooner."  
  
Aziraphale shrugged again, helplessly this time. "Dear boy, _would_ you watch the road?"  
  
"No!" Crowley shouted, thumping the wheel. "How can you expect me to concentrate _now_?"  
  
The angel sat back, exuding the kind of miffed silence that never seemed to lift until Crowley gave in and offered an olive branch. He drummed _his_ fingers along the passenger-door paneling, which made Crowley think about what it must be like to sincerely wish to commit murder. He'd never had a particularly solid grasp of that sentiment (or, in fact, any grasp of it at all).  
  
"Aziraphale," said Crowley, feigning an air of calm. "You need to tell me what that means."  
  
Aziraphale released a heavy sigh, wrecking his own charade. "It's the hopeful language she used surrounding colleagues, friends, and lovers-to-be in which I'd become the most interested."  
  
"Lovers-to-be?" Crowley echoed, rubbing his chin, contemplating the next sign that told him London was only a few miles off. "Why can she possibly have been concerned with—well, _okay_ ," he allowed, remembering the company they'd kept. "That Anathema girl seemed keen on that techie-wannabe in, you know, a resigned sort of way. Agnes cared about her own."  
  
"The extraordinary thing," replied Aziraphale, slowly, "is how much she cared about strangers."  
  
Crowley shot him an annoyed sidelong glance. "In these circumstances, angel, you've got to treat me like I'm the dimmest reader you can imagine. I only had a quick flip-through while the M25 Orbital was, functionally, the Tenth Circle of Hell. I had a lot of other things to worry about," he added. _You above all, ungrateful git that you are_ , he thought bitterly. _Isn't that swell?_  
  
Aziraphale nodded, his lips twitching in the direction of a smile, as if it weren't an altogether unreasonable request. "I have good reason to believe that Agnes wasn't playing matchmaker solely because she wanted to know she'd have however-many-greats grandchildren. She was sensible."  
  
Crowley flipped on his high-beam headlights, happy to be on a relatively unoccupied stretch of road. "If sensible means not wanting people to be alone for the rest of their short, miserable lives."  
  
"Not everyone she'd concerned herself with is destined for a brief existence," Aziraphale replied.  
  
"There's no such thing as destiny for us, angel. We're _outside the system_. That kind of thing is for humans who need to feel like some corner of the universe actually gives a toss about them."  
  
"Agnes gave enough of a toss for all of Creation combined," said Aziraphale, snippily. " _Er_."  
  
"Since it's clear you'd like to castigate yourself for your own swear but can't _quite_ bring yourself to do it," Crowley sighed, put-upon, "I'll do it for you. _Language_ , angel."  
  
Aziraphale let out a sigh of relief. "Much obliged. Further to the point you've just made, I'm not so sure our esteemed prophetess necessarily subscribed to your theory. She appears to have believed in something akin to self-fulfilling prophecy for almost any creature possessing free will."  
  
"I'm not clear on whether we had it all along," Crowley mused, "or if we sort of _stole_ it."  
  
"Stealing fire comes foremost in the grand tradition of folly," sighed Aziraphale, and it was becoming painfully obvious that some unspecified aspect of what he'd read was causing him to beat around the bush. "Where was I? Ah, yes: free will. It would seem she believes us capable of, er, exactly the same actions she believes Miss Device and Mr. Pulsifer to be capable of, not to mention, well, our old mutual acquaintance Shadwell and that charming Tracy woman—"  
  
Crowley brought the Jeep to a screeching halt. If there'd been anyone behind them, they'd have been done for. He was trying not to think about that, what when all he could think of now was the fact that Aziraphale had managed to read between the lines too thoroughly for anyone's sanity.  
  
"Moot point, isn't it?" he said, quietly sarcastic. "What when you believe I'm not even capable—"  
  
"Just drive," said Aziraphale, impatiently, glancing behind them. "And I never said I..." His expression went slack, lips pinched in a frown. "Dear boy, I simply wasn't _thinking_."  
  
"Well, you're thinking now," Crowley sighed, nerves jangling, letting his foot off the brake, causing Aziraphale's teeth to rattle with their lurch forward. "I suppose I ought to be grateful, eh?"  
  
"This is no time for your cheek, Crowley," Aziraphale hissed. "I'm irrefutably certain that Agnes Nutter had intended for us to, er, _well_. Become an item, as they say. Don't they?"  
  
"Nobody says that anymore," Crowley reassured him, tugging his glasses back down onto the bridge of his nose. "Ergo, it can't possibly be true. _There_. Aren't you relieved?"  
  
Aziraphale's reflection in the rearview mirror chewed its lip. "I'm not entirely sure," it said.  
  
Crowley looked away and hit the gas harder, the blood in his veins performing that irritatingly human trick where it felt an awful lot like it was in the process of turning to ice. "No?"  
  
"No," Aziraphale echoed. "After all this fuss, what have we _possibly_ got to lose?"  
  
"Wait, do you mean _what have we possibly got to lose by debating this_ or _what have we possibly got to lose by you inviting me up to your mothball-strewn flat for a night of meaningless sex_?" Crowley asked, feeling his cheeks burn. There, he'd finally done it. Underlined the weird, eternally-present tension about which they never _quite_ managed rational discourse.  
  
"By the terms of her implication, I'm not sure it'd be meaningless," Aziraphale ventured meekly.  
  
"I want you to think long and hard about what you've just said," Crowley replied, feeling his pulse ratchet up a notch as Marble Arch came into view. "You're saying that we ought to become romantically involved—or maybe just physically involved, what do I know?—because some seventeenth-century witch held the altruistic belief we might have an ice-cube's chance in—"  
  
" _Excuse_ me for suggesting it might be pleasant to broaden one's horizons," Aziraphale interjected, folding his arms across his chest. "It's obvious the idea disturbs you, so forget I—"  
  
"It's all been a game to you, is that it?" Crowley asked, swinging onto a one-way side street at breakneck speed. "Angel, don't you get it? We're just like them. We have favorite things and bad habits and prejudices and, yeah, the capacity to love and to hate and _everything in between_."  
  
"I quite think I'd understood that, my dear," said Aziraphale, numbly, "after the events of tonight."  
  
"Tonight's not over," Crowley insisted, finding that _he_ was the one who wasn't going to let this rest. "Coming up here on the left, for example: we've got a choice to make. I can drop you off at the pile of ashes that used to be your bookshop, and we can pretend this never happened," he suggested, " _or_ you can come back to mine and find out what it's like to sleep in a real bed, because I am _not_ spending the night in anything with springs that rusted out circa 1902."  
  
"I should like to point out," said Aziraphale, smugly, "that _you're_ the one pushing—"  
  
"Very clever," Crowley sighed. "Set it up so you can pin it all on the demon, why don't you."  
  
Aziraphale touched Crowley's wrist, disarmingly frank. "If it's all the same, let's go to yours."  
  
Crowley let out a disbelieving laugh, running his fingers through his hair. "It's that easy, is it?"  
  
"Don't make light of this," Aziraphale murmured, withdrawing his hand so slowly as to transform the gesture into a caress. " _That_ , at least, was never my intention. I thought perhaps..."  
  
"You thought perhaps we had a nice moment back there," said Crowley, maneuvering into Mayfair with a complete lack of finesse. "With the wine and sword and all. Is that what this is about?"  
  
Aziraphale bristled in protest; great, the tactic had _worked_. "Do you want this or not?"  
  
Crowley reeled a little at that, breathless, his gut clenching. "I guess we'll find out, won't we?"  
  
Parking the Jeep in his usual spot felt like something akin to heresy, but, lacking his dearly departed former mode of conveyance, there was really nothing for it. With a hastily-muttered _Stay put, angel_ , Crowley hopped out of the vehicle, slammed his door, and went around to open Aziraphale's for him. Aziraphale's hand was cool in Crowley's as he helped him step down onto the pavement; it felt like far more than a formality, what with the challenge he'd been issued.  
  
"Thank you," Aziraphale said, leaning entirely too close for all of a split-second before turning to shut the door. He turned back to Crowley just as quickly, offering his arm. "I should hope so."  
  
Hope was rarely a virtue of which Crowley liked heavy reminders, especially since he was, when put to it, keenly aware that he had it in excess. It was a major failing in a demon, right along with all of the other major failings he'd neatly chucked into his imaginary bucket. "Right," he said.  
  
He spent approximately the next three seconds blinking at Aziraphale's arm as if he couldn't for the life of him remember what to _do_ with it, at which point Aziraphale took hold of Crowley's wrist with his free hand and firmly wrapped Crowley's arm around his own. _Ah_.  
  
"I'm sorry," said Aziraphale, earnestly, the peevishness gone out of him. "It's been a long day."  
  
_You impossible bastard,_ Crowley thought, wide-eyed, helpless to do anything other than lean into the momentum of what Aziraphale had done with his arm. _That wasn't so hard, was it?_  
  
Aziraphale was a competent kisser. Granted, Crowley had no point of reference beyond one drunken example laid on him in the fifteenth century by a certain human of artistic temperament, so there was _that_. This involved far more judicious use of tongue (at which he decided an appreciative noise might be in order), and even the catch of Aziraphale's teeth at his lower lip.  
  
"Something tells me you'd prefer we took this indoors," Aziraphale murmured approvingly.  
  
"Something tells _me_ you don't want to admit you're in a rush," Crowley countered, but he fumbled in his pocket for his keys. The sooner he could get them off the street, the better.  
  
"Why should I even hesitate?" asked Aziraphale once the front door to Crowley's building had closed behind them, pressing boldly at the small of Crowley's back, urging him Crowley up the stairs ahead of him. "I've thought of little else since that spectacularly clever turn of events."  
  
"If you're trying to tell me my gross incompetence back there was a turn-on, wow," said Crowley, deadpan, jogging up the last few steps in order to unlock the door to his flat. "You're the one who turned the tide with all that grandstanding about the Ineffable Plan. I'd have _never_ —"  
  
Well, all right. Being kissed up against one's own boring white wall was far from unpleasant.  
  
"You'd have thought of something if I hadn't," Aziraphale murmured against Crowley's cheek.  
  
"Now I _know_ you aren't joking," Crowley replied. "And, _er_. For what it's worth?"  
  
" _Hmmm_?" asked Aziraphale, distracted, working his hands beneath Crowley's jacket.  
  
"You were pretty hot back there, too," Crowley admitted, grinning. "Bed's this way, angel."


End file.
